Quentin Peel: An election at gunpoint

By Quentin Peel

Financial Times

Published: October 6 2004

This Saturday the people of
Afghanistan will have a chance to vote, for the first time in their lives, for a
new head of state.

By all accounts, there is great popular enthusiasm for the poll. After years
of bitter conflict, the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war, there is a
desperate hope among ordinary Afghans that a democratic election will somehow
bring peace and security to their country. Yet the omens are not good. There
is a real danger that such exaggerated expectations will be disappointed.

For a start, the election will be neither free nor fair. The country is in
far too chaotic a state. Nobody really knows how many people will dare turn up
at the polling stations. They may fear intimidation by gunmen backing the many
and various candidates (there are 18 on the ballot paper) or being attacked by
supporters of the former Taliban regime, who oppose the whole exercise.

After 25 years of fighting and massive dislocation of the population, no one
really knows if the electoral register drawn up in recent months, with its 10.5m
voters, is remotely realistic. Multiple registration has been rife. There is a
desperate shortage of trained election staff to run the polling stations, and
even fewer objective "observers", either domestic or international, who can
properly monitor the process. Only 14 per cent of voters have had any
instruction on how to vote, according to a new report*.

The
determination of Taliban remnants to disrupt voting is causing havoc in the
south and south-east of the country: in Jalalabad and Kandahar, fewer than 50
per cent of potential voters thought they would be "free to choose" their
candidate, according to the same report. Elsewhere, the problem is rather the
power of intimidation wielded by warlords and their militia.

"Political
repression by local strongmen is the principal problem," according to Human
Rights Watch**, the New York-based monitoring group. "Throughout the country,
militarised political factions continue to cement their hold on political power
at the local level, using force, threats and corruption to stifle more
legitimate political activity and dominate the election process."

The
elections have already been postponed once, from June this year. Since then,
internal security has continued to deteriorate, partly no doubt because
elections were in the offing. Between May and August, 12 election workers were
killed and 33 were injured.

Parliamentary, regional and local polls
have now been postponed at least until April next year. But the presidential
election is still going ahead on Saturday, in spite of serious doubts expressed
by independent observers.

The driving force behind carrying on,
regardless of the security situation, has been the US administration. President
George W. Bush needed to demonstrate to US electors that his game plan for
bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq was on track. So the US election
timetable has been a vital factor in setting the Afghan polling date. That was
very short-sighted.

"To be pushing for elections at this time was
premature," according to one long-term Kabul resident. "Afghans were not
demanding them. The elections have been an incredible distraction from more
important issues of security and state-building."

It is too late now to
go back. So the real question is whether, in such circumstances, the
presidential poll will enjoy enough popular legitimacy to help stabilise the
country and undermine the rule of the gun.

Everyone expects Hamid
Karzai, the US-backed incumbent president, to emerge as the victor. None of the
other candidates can attract as broad a base, particularly among the Pashtun,
the largest ethnic group. Yet even he has been unable to campaign for the past
month outside Kabul, for fear of attack. This week he finally made it to
Ghazni, south-west of the capital, surrounded by hundreds of troops, police and
US security guards, to address a rally of some 10,000.

Mr Karzai's
first challenge is to get more than 50 per cent of the vote, in order to avoid a
second round, further destabilising the country. He also must hope that, in
spite of the obvious flaws in the election system, his rivals will accept the
result and not simply take up arms again.

The failure to disarm the
commanders and warlords who litter the country has been the greatest failure of
the US-led allies in Afghanistan - and of Mr Karzai's interim government.
Instead, they have sought to co-opt them into the administrative system. That
was certainly not popular. Disarmament of the warlords was cited as "the most
important thing to do to improve security" by 65 per cent of those questioned in
a recent poll.

That will require huge international effort to back up
the elected Afghan president. If it is not done before the parliamentary
elections next year, the security situation is likely to get much worse. But it
will require Nato to move its troops beyond Kabul - and the separate American
forces to focus on more than just hunting Osama bin Laden on the Afghan-Pakistan
border.

What is clear is that a symbolic election on Saturday is not
going to be enough to bring peace to Afghanistan. That will be achieved only
when the guns have gone.